[sc34wg3] CTM - IRI-escaping

[Steve Pepper]

* Lars Heuer
|
| Comments against 0975
| <http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0975.htm>
| 
| I wonder if the IRI-escaping via "'" is necessary at all. In
| CTM (and TMQL) we have the angle brackets < > to embed an IRI
| (if necessary).
| 
| Kyoto proposal:
|     http://psi.example.org/'Person,Composer'
| 
| CTM draft (N935):
|    <http://psi.example.org/Person,Composer>
| 
| Comments? Ideas?

The general escaping mechanism (not just for IRIs, but for any
CTM delimiter in any context) was proposed by Prof. Lee. He
argued for it very convincingly and should therefore be the one
to answer your question.

Part of the background is that the WG in Kyoto accepted the
Norwegian National Body comment about making a syntactic
distinction between IRIs used as topic identifiers and IRIs used
simply as locators (i.e. as the values of occurrences and
variant names). The proposal was to reserve angle brackets for
the latter. This meant that angle brackets could not serve as
the mechanism for escaping CTM delimiters inside an IRI.

However, this is only part of the story. Prof. Lee pointed out
the need for an escaping mechanism in other contexts as well
(e.g. QNames) and he managed to persuade the WG to go for a
generalized mechanism.

Steve
 
--
Conference Chair, Topic Maps 2008
Oslo, April 2-4 2008
www.topicmaps.com